And though it may be true that the grouping of the rock temples of _Alara_ (vulg. _Ellora_) and _Ajunta_ in India occupies more room, and granting _Angkor_ in _Kamboja_ (which wasn’t a Buddhist temple) to seem more majestic when seen at a distance, still, according to competent judges who also visited these ruins, the Båråbudur is grander by far as well for the unity of its whole as for the harmony of its different parts, and for both the nobleness of the schemer’s thought and the excellence of the execution. This harmony supports the opinion of this building’s having been built after the scheme of one and the very same architect; a man of a surprising intellectual capacity indeed, who could have conceived such a scheme to be carried out in an incalculable number of years by hundreds of thousands of labourers. We cannot possibly believe that so much labour and time would have been spent on the building of a prince’s mausoleum, however powerful he might have been. Moreover, there are reasons enough to suppose that _the_ prince of _this_ empire, at whose command the Båråbudur must have been built, commenced or partly achieved, should have died before the finishing of this colossal work, and that his ashes were buried in the sumptuous grave temple, at that period of time most likely already finished, and the ruins of which we shall visit in the _desså_ (native village) of _Mĕndut_. Or more exactly: that his successor or children or blood-relations, or perhaps his people, built this _tyanḍi_ on the pit in which those ashes had been put away, and that as a worthy mausoleum to the king who once presented his subjects with the Båråbudur. Some unfinished parts of both the Båråbudur and the ruins in the valley of _Parambanan_, especially the unfinished imageries at the foot (hidden again under the outer-terrace) on the outer-wall of the large temple, make us suppose that these products of art had been _scarcely_ achieved, and the imageries _hardly_ finished and placed on their walls, when the buddhistic empire of Central Java fell into a state of decay or became ruined at all. Upwards of a thousand years have rolled since over these colossal ruins. Earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions replaced their masses of stone, solar heat and torrents introduced and supported their decay, parasitic plants dispersed their foundations, and narrow-minded slaves of ignorance and fanaticism damaged or spoilt many of their produce of art—still the ruins stand there as an impressive fact scarcely no less uncredible than undeniable; a majestic product of a master-mind of the past, a stone epic immortal even in its decline.